LA ZAMPA, For an aesthetics of presence

Marie Reverdy

 

 

"Who else in the world knows something like the body"?

It is the latest product, the longest to be decanted, refined, disassembled and reassembled of our old culture. If the West is a fall, as its name suggests, the body is the last weight, the extremity of the weight that swings in this fall. The body is gravity. The laws of gravitation concern the bodies in space.*

 

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It all could start with the story of a fall, or rather the experience of a fall : the moment of balance, the emptiness, the sensation of a time abolished despite the speed, the feeling of floating despite the weight, the consciousness of the inexorable and the dazzling way in which all this ends.

The corporeality that is displayed in the work of Magali Milian and Romuald Luydlin could be arranged according to the apparent disorder of the falling body. In this fall, if the body looks in vain for the resistance of the air, it does not suffer the torments of its conscience. Because the fall is an event and is not a narrative. The falling body is a body that has no distance from what it is going through. It experiences a pure duration, which cannot be related to a time as long as this one is devoid of any project. The choreographic work of La Zampa explores this precise time, the one during which the body explores the void, independently of the causes that provoked this changeover.

Romuald Luydlin's encounter with the Japanese arts - Butoh dance and Noh theater - thus manifests its influence. La Zampa borrows from the Noh theater its purity and its particular temporality : that of the suspension of the movement which is named, in Japanese, the Mie (見 え or 見得). Its aim is to increase the intensity of the gesture. Similarly, Butoh, as a "dance of darkness", comes from an intensive work of introspection and is characterized, in addition to the taboo subjects that it wishes to explore, by the slowness of its execution.

For if the fall cannot be grasped for the one who looks at it, it is different for the one who feels it : the falling body goes through the end of time. This half-open gap in the consciousness, this fraction of a second which is experienced with all the weight of duration, is manifested in the work by an aesthetics of the loop (Opium), of the stop (Requiem) or of the variation (Dream On, Spekies).

If time is that dimension of reality that makes change possible, La Zampa explores the process more than the finality, a time that is built without project, a duration that only deals with existence.

 

The body of the performers, and their movement, refer to nothing but themselves. No legible, intelligible cause orders the movement. The body moves according to an organic necessity which intention is not easy to spot. It responds to its own laws. In this way, La Zampa shows a body in resistance, a body-in-itself, irreducible. A philosophical body, a falling body that does not care about the subject it embodies, a "reasoning system" :
 

 

"The body is a great reason, a plurality with one sense, a war and peace, a herd and a shepherd. An instrument of your body is also your little reason, my brother, which you call “spirit” – a little instrument and toy of your great reason.

 

“I,” you say, and are proud of the word. But greater is that in which you do not wish to have faith – your body and its great reason : that does not say “I,” but does “I.” "**

We are the witnesses of a show in which a body is falling without knowing it. A body that claims its presence and manifests its will to be there. Whether for Requiem, Dream On, Spekies or Opium, La Zampa favors a choreographic writing of the mastery that is built on a behavior, unceasingly maintained, of a body that never loses the consciousness it has of itself. By doing so, the body of the dancers becomes force field, density, attraction system.
 
La Zampa works on the fascination exerted by the body when it is an image, when it is a hybrid, with a masked, grimed face, but that does not become significant for all that. The body as image is a body that captures the eye, because it becomes an enigma for the eye. The quality of the body's presence is then all the more refined, essential, pure because it escapes from any form of identification. The body-image is not a representation, it is a movement.
 
Indeed, the body of Magali Milian, that does know well the fluidity of contemporary technicity, is engaged in the exercise of resistance, necessity and response to the constraints induced by the practice of Aikido. This body that falls without knowing it avoids methodically the obstacles which would disturb its course. Choreographic writing is organized according to a constant search for balance and an insatiable quest for stability. The falling body finds its tranquility in the movement, because inaction would abolish any form of ambition. Thus, the work of La Zampa questions the surge of survival, refusing that the bodies abandon themselves or are left abandoned.
 
And yet, this philosophical body that falls without knowing it is an existential body. For although it does not feel anguish, it is able to make us feel it. By moving, it makes us experience our own vertigo, our fear of emptiness, and the risk that we can take, that of throwing ourselves into the void. The musical work, mostly done by Marc Sens, is the most visceral sign that expresses the threat. But it is silent, almost distant, serene, we watch it without fearing it and face the subtle mixture of innocence, anxiety and ecstasy.

* Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus II : Writings on Sexuality (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy). Fordham Univeristy Press, 2013.

** Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Despisers of the Body", Thus spoke Zarathustra, French Translation of Henri Albert, Société du Mercure de France, 1903 [sixth edition], Œuvres complètes de Frédéric Nietzsche, vol. 9, pp. 45-47